The Tone Poem Ascendant

Warmth of Other Suns. unbound. Juba. as an antidote to fear of death, i eat the stars. If you skim through the titles of recently written works covered in this newsletter, you might notice something about them. Overwhelmingly, these pieces have evocative titles, titles that mean something and that go well beyond anodyne descriptors like “sonata for cello and piano” or “adagio for mixed ensemble”. And these titles are often picked up and elaborated on in program notes that tie the compositions’ musical materials to specific concepts that can be set forth in words.

I haven’t done a robust survey, but my impression is that this is broadly true across new music spaces in this country in the present moment. It’s not that absolutely no one is writing things with descriptive, non-programmatic titles, but such works are quite rare, far from the new music scene’s bread and butter. We are living in the age of the tone poem ascendant, and today I’d like to offer a few thoughts as to why.